grieve me. | fear there will be no fishermen tn heaven except our 
elderly friend Peter, who, being himself a fisherman, may in fellow 
feeling let them slip through his fingers after the manner of fish. 
But not to continue this secular pursuit of discovering such depravi- 
ties (of which there would be no end), save so as to show why my virtue 
is always at white heat—however cold the thermometer may be—and 
that I will not be decoyed into a sport which serves, if indulged in with 
sufficient persistency, to eradicate the last faint vestige of truthfulness 
from the heart of the votary. Truth must still have an ad- 
vocate. I will not lie except at intervals and under severe 
provocation ; and so I will not fish 
I start in a leisurely fashion ; for haste is foe to good 
fishing. To have a deliberate air is impressive to fish. 
| make haste slowly therefore. I am not eager to be 
known as starting on a voyaze of fishing; for such 
enterprise engenders hallucinations of imagination as 
to the results of your expedition (in the minds of 
the populace). I move out calmly, like a ship 
starting from its harbor toward high seas. A 
| sweet lady I know smiles at me going, with a touch 
F of irony in her face, and a boy picking up chips 
on the beach pauses (much to his content, for he 
does not admire work) in his efforts, to give me a 
quizzical look, and a girl smiles at me with a wave 
aes of hand good to look upon; and I go past the board 
P walk where the beech-trees grow and cast gentle 
shadows, and down the lane of sand hills peaked with 
pines, and loiter along with scant precipitancy as befits 
a man going on such solemn business as fishing; for as 
¥ Ike Walton has shown, fishing is the soul of solemnity, and 
is after all no sport, but life's real and serious business. We 
must not therefore approach such vocation with the least spirit of levity. 
1 sight the river with reeds growing solid green along far banks where 
the stream bends in gentle curves like a boat's prow, and rest my heart 
in taking a long breathing view of the lake whose waters tilt against the 
sky green as bulk glass, and let the cool wind from its bosom lave me 
as if it weve a wave washing some point of shore; and then | bethink 
me that | have no bait nor any line nor any rod, and turn back in medi- 
tative r:ood so as not to appear disconcerted. I reach home, take these 
84 
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